One downside to using platform clouds is that they can be rigid. It’s easier to get started on a platform cloud as opposed to an infrastructure cloud such as Amazon Web Services — which merely offers access to raw computing resources, such as virtual servers — but a platform cloud also provides less flexibility. And with Amazon now offering its own platform-ish service called Elastic Beanstalk, more cloud providers are trying to bridge the gap between infrastructure clouds and platform clouds. CloudBees is the latest to try to solve this problem.

ClickStarts are essentially templates. Users will be able to define a particular architecture and save it to use in future projects — or pick from several pre-built templates. ClickStacks go even further by allowing users to add additional development languages and tools to their CloudBees environment, including alternative Java Virtual Machine langauges like Scala and Clojure.

CloudBees may be an underdog, but it does have some other key advantages. First, the team’s background. Labourey was steeped in Java during his eight years at JBoss, starting as the general manager of JBoss Europe, rising to the ranks of CTO and eventually co-managing JBoss after it was acquired by Red Hat in 2007.

And in 2010, CloudBees acquired another Java platform cloud called Stax Networks, which was founded by WebSphere co-founder Spike Washburn. In other words, CloudBees has some deep expertise in Java, particularly in the unglamorous but important area of middleware. But it’s not like Oracle, IBM, and Red Hat don’t have plenty of Java expertise as well. Fortunately, CloudBees has more going for it than that.

The CloudBees team also has strong ties to open source community through development and support of Jenkins, an open source tool that helps developers make sure common code bases constantly stay in sync and tested. CloudBees employs Kohsuke Kawaguchi, the lead developer of an open source project called Jenkins, and it offers an enterprise version of the application.

Adron Hall, a developer of the open source platform cloud IronFoundry, told Finley: “Cloudbees has been and continues to be at the forefront of developer thought leadership and technology around continuous integration and delivery in the Java landscape. Sometimes CloudBees and Jenkins actually make me want to write Java again.”

Have a read of the full Wired Enterprise report and have your say: Is CloudBees’ sting going to last? Will the giants of platform cloud computing even feel the stinger?